Toni Reece: Hi there. This is Toni Reece, and welcome to the Get Inspired! Project for Berks County Living magazine. Today I have Daniel Barringer with me. Hi, Daniel.
Daniel Barringer: Hello.
Toni: How are you?
Daniel: I’m very good, thank you.
Toni: Good. So, Daniel, tell us a little bit about yourself.
Daniel: I’m a Preserve Manager for Natural Lands Trust. I’ve been doing this about 24 years. I love working outdoors, and that’s one of the reasons I decided to go into this field.
Toni: A Preserve Manager.
Daniel: Correct.
Toni: Tell us just what that means.
Daniel: A Preserve Manager is someone who takes care of the land and manages the natural resources on it for wildlife and for public use.
Toni: Okay. You said you’re part of an organization that manages how many acres of land?
Daniel: Natural Lands Trust owns and manages about 20,000 acres of open space in Eastern Pennsylvania and Southern New Jersey.
Toni: That’s just amazing. Let’s go into the Project. Dan, what does inspiration means to you?
Daniel: Inspiration is what keeps me going when the work is physically difficult, tedious, uncomfortable and overwhelming. Stewardship of natural lands involves planting and maintaining trees and meadows, managing invasive plants, and maintaining trails so that people can come to enjoy these places. We do our work in all weather, enjoy the bad with the good, because maintaining natural habitats is important.
How can the work that I do imitate nature, mitigate the human impact of land use, and restore wildlife habitat? I try to approach our work with humility. I’m not trying to improve nature, just give it the opportunity to heal itself.
Toni: I love that answer. I want to go to how do you stay inspired. What does that mean? For you to stay inspired means you need to stay in what frame of mind?
Daniel: Positive energy. Appreciating whatever is good around me. The beauty of the land. The role that nature is playing for us. That’s what inspires me.
Toni: So it’s almost a reverence.
Daniel: I guess so.
Toni: That’s what it sounds like, and respect.
Daniel: Respect, yes.
Toni: Respect what you’re doing. To stay inspired and to be inspired is to realize the importance of the work that you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and also the word you used, humility – to stay in humility with it. What does that mean?
Daniel: That means knowing that we are not really in control of every aspect of what we’re doing. We’re doing a little bit of tweaking and a little bit of steering things here and there, but we want to work with nature and not against nature.
Toni: Okay. How do you put that type of inspiration into place, into practice here in Berks County? What specifically happens?
Daniel: I’m fortunate that I manage one of Natural Lands Trust’s newest preserves in Berks County, the Green Hills Preserve. It’s 168 acres of beautiful, open space and wildlife habitat. It has about two miles of trails that are open to the public, dawn to dusk, free of charge.
Our goals there are to restore the grasslands, plant trees to increase the buffer along streams, and manage some of the unwanted invasive plants that would otherwise take over much of the preserve. With the help of our wonderful volunteers, we are beginning to make some progress.
You can read about our Green Hills Preserve on the Natural Lands Trust website, which is natlands.org.
Toni: Dan, where is this located in Green Hills?
Daniel: It’s in Robeson Township, just along Route 10.
Toni: When you get off the turnpike, the Morgantown Expressway, do we go right or left? Which way do we go?
Daniel: When you’re turning onto Route 10, right in Green Hills. There are two exits for Green Hills, so I guess it depends on which one you turn onto. If you are southbound on Route 10, you would turn onto Gunhart Road. The entrance is on Gunhart Road.
Toni: Okay. That’s what I wanted to get to. Great! How many acres again?
Daniel: It’s 168 acres.
Toni: Wow. So really how you are inspired and working on this new project, that must be amazing.
Daniel: Yes, it’s a beautiful property.
Toni: Is it?
Daniel: Yes.
Toni: So what’s the wildlife that you see typically?
Daniel: We see things like Indigo Buntings. We see a lot of hawks. It’s a great place to do bird watching, but there are also turkey, deer, fox and other things to see.
Toni: So you don’t typically deal with the same day twice?
Daniel: No. I never know what I’m going to do in the morning. I have written plans and I try to stick to them, but I think one of the things that is great about this job is you never know what’s going to come up.
Toni: Yes. Wow. Have you ever witnessed something, Dan, that totally inspired you by what you saw on the land?
Daniel: I think just the beauty of the land. Last summer I saw two rainbows – one at Green Hills, and one at Crow’s Nest Preserve, and they were just beautiful.
Toni: Wow. Oh my gosh, you’re making me jealous. I would love to see that. Who in Berks County inspires you?
Daniel: Mike and Jan Slater, who are naturalists, who are so knowledgeable and generous with their time. Mike writes articles about nature for the Berks County column in the Reading Eagle. Both are active with the Muhlenberg Botanic Club, a group that promotes the identification ecology preservation of our local flora. The couple gave us local native seed to help restore the first meadow that we tackled at Green Hills Preserve.
Mike and Jan are also bird and butterfly experts and share their observations online on websites such as Ebird. Mike and his wife Jan have converted lawn at their home to meadow, so they demonstrate good stewardship.
Toni: Good stewardship of the land. That’s what you do?
Daniel: That’s what I aspire to.
Toni: Okay – and that’s what you are inspired by in others.
Daniel: Yes.
Toni: What do you want your legacy to be, Dan?
Daniel: I’d like my contributions to outweigh my consumption. We’re all consuming resources, and I’d like the outcomes of my work, lands that are beautiful and inviting to wildlife and people, to be greater than what I take.
Toni: I know you’ve given a lot of thought to the answers to these questions. You can tell that. I thank you so very much for doing what you do and for giving such a great interview to the Get Inspired! Project. Thank you for showing up today.
Daniel: Thank you for having me.
Toni: You’re welcome.
